Theme Week: Celebrate CoC

[sistermagpie]

Today, Juneteenth, seems like a good day to start off a new theme week celebrating black/poc characters and black/poc creators!

Who are some of your favorite poc characters and why? Artists? Writers? Fanart? Storylines? Books you'd recommend? They'er welcome all year long, but this is a good week to spotlight them.

Featured here is the work of Luciano Vecchio and Khary Randolph cover art for Kwanza Osajyefo and Tim Smith's Black.

Comments

[deh_tommy]

Wait, there was a black Wonder Woman?

Just to be clear, what does person of colour mean in this context? Is that just anyone who’s not white, or what?

[icon_uk]

Yup, Nubia, Diana's long lost twin sister/rival/sometime replacement (depending on the iteration) debuted in 1973.

Given current events, the focus is primarily on black characters and creators, but we're never going to exclude characters and creators from other ethnicities if you have any you wish to post.

[speedingtortoise]

First person to come to mind for me is Mike Colter and his amazing portrayal of Luke Cage. He absolutely nailed it, and I can't imagine another actor filling that role. If they ever bring Luke to the MCU, I will be devastated if they have Mike come back as well.

[deh_tommy]

You mean you’ll be devastated if he won’t come back, right?

[speedingtortoise]

Hah, yeah! Typo

[arilou_skiff]

I read that as "Call of Cthulhu" first.

[icon_uk]

Given Lovecraft, that would be an... uncomfortable combination of themes, to say the least.

[leahandillyana]

I am not really aware which creator is Black when I read English books, so it’s hard to say for me. I'm a big fan of Ta Nehisi Coates Black Panther and Roxanne Gaye's World of Wakanda. My favourite all time authors are shoujo mangaka: Hagio Moto, Keiko Takemiya, Riyoko Ikeda, Jun Kouga, Kaori Yuki, CLAMP. My favourite anime creators are Kunihiko Ikuhara, Hideaki Anno and Yoshiyuki Tomino. My favourite characters are ouji-sama types (Haruka Tenoh, Seiya Kou, Juri Arisugawa etc.) and male nekos (though remarkable ones aren't POC, at least not explicitly). For Western works, I really like Miles, and is Kamala a POC? Cause I love Kamala.

[donnblake]

Broadly, Person of Color refers to anyone not of white-European descent, and would indeed include Kamala, a Pakistani American.

[donnblake]

To clarify my own comment a little bit, broadly Person of Color (as it is used in the United States) refers to anyone not of white-European descent. I would suspect that other countries have historically traced the intersection of race and language in different ways, although Person of Color at least lacks a national identifier, which makes it easier to talk about matters internationally.

I suppose I would be surprised to learn that, for instance, Japanese artists and writers living and working in Japan thought of themselves as People of Color, but I've been surprised before.

[deh_tommy]

For the longest time, I thought black and white just referred to skin pigmentation. I still don’t really understand what is or isn’t black or white.

[donnblake]

I mean, race is fairly arbitrarily constructed social construct that rooted in deep misunderstandings of biology, so trying to come to a strict scientific definition of what qualifies a person as being a member of a specific race is, I think, fundamentally misguided.

*But* it's an arbitrarily constructed social construct rooted in deep misunderstandings of biology that radically affects how people are treated on personal, societal and institutional levels, and has done so for generations.

I don't feel qualified to try and give a solid working definition of blackness here, but I think I'm on relatively solid ground if I say that, at least in the United States, skin pigmentation is a signifier of blackness, but not the thing and the whole of the thing.

[leahandillyana]

The term is nonexistent in Japanese culture. I think it's mostly nonexistent in countries without transoceanic colonial past. However, since Japanese creators would certainly be considered non-white in American society, I believe it was apropriate to talk about them in a post talking about creators of colour. That said, Marvel has a lot more characters of colour in general, than DC. At least in prominent roles.

[donnblake]

Oh, sure- it's never a bad idea to step out of the American mainstream, especially if we're aiming to be reminded that comics are a broad and diverse field.